Friday, May 03, 2013

In my previous post, I wrote about coming to terms with the metaphorical nature of Proto-Indo-European (PIE),
which may or may not ever have existed as an actual language spoken by
actual people at an actual moment in time but that is posited to be the
common ancestor of most of the languages of Europe and many in western
and central Asia.

To recap, the gist of that post is that the Indo-European hypothesis is large and contains multitudes and
that the options seem to be to accept the astonishing inexactness of
the metaphors or submit to the paralyzing mind-blowingness of what we
use them to try to explain. I suggested that the latter option could be
inconvenient if you're trying to discuss historical linguistics and
language relatedness in a class that meets for an hour and fifty minutes twice a week for 15 weeks.

Anyway, continuing on the topic of the metaphors that we use to try
to create some kind of manageable order out of the chaos that is the
story of human language and how it got this way, we turn now to a fellow
name of August Schleicher (1821-1868), a
German linguist by training and profession who specialized in classical
and Slavic languages. Schleicher, who may have had some of the same
concerns that I have about how we can possibly even try to conceptualize
an unattested 5,000 to 7,000-year-old super-ancestor Ur-language
that might not even have actually existed, decided that it was time
someone got around to the task of trying to reconstruct
Proto-Indo-European.
....

"What does all this have to do with metaphors?" you might be
thinking. Everything. It has everything to do with metaphors. For one
thing, even as Schleicher published his reconstruction of a 5- to
7,000-year-old dead language that might not have existed in the first
place, he also made it clear that he knew all along that he was dealing in metaphors,
and particularly in a big PIE-shaped metaphor, one that made it
possible for him to reconstruct what was quite possibly a mythical
language. As he wrote in the Compendium in 1861 (although of course he actually wrote it in German):

"A form traced back to the sound-grade of the Indo-European
original language, we call a fundamental form. When we bring forward
these fundamental forms, we do not assert that they really were once in existence." (Emphasis added.)